Tagged With automobiles

Video: You obviously need to strap down the luggage you put on the roof of your car, but as this crash test footage from Switzerland's Dynamic Test Center shows, you might also want to strap down the bags in the back of your station wagon. In an impact, pieces of luggage becomes flying missiles targeted at the vehicle's passengers.

It seems like every futurist and her sister wanted to turn cars into boats back in the 20th century. Remember the Water-Mobile of 1947? Or how about the poor man's yacht of 1958? Well, this Jazz Age invention had them all beat.

The late 1930s were dark times for Britain. War was on the horizon, and things were about to get very, very tough. But some periodicals tried keeping things light with utopian visions of tomorrow. Like this March 5, 1938 cover of Modern Wonder which featured the streamlined transportation of the future.

A recent survey shows that people want self-driving cars to be programmed to minimise casualties during an accident, even if it causes the death of the rider. Trouble is, the same survey shows that people don't actually want to ride in cars that are programmed this way. That's obviously a problem — and we're going to have to get over it.

According to futurists of the 1950s, people of the 21st century were all supposed to be zipping around in solar-powered cars, watching wall-sized TVs and enjoying holidays on the moon. We were even supposed to all have our own yachts. Well, half a yacht at least.

Google wants its self-driving cars on roads and your driveway as soon as possible, and today it is asking the US Congress to acknowledge that autonomous vehicles are so radically new that they need a whole new set of rules.

For years, government agencies have chased technologies that would make it easier to ensure that vehicles in carpool lanes are actually carrying multiple passengers. Perhaps the only reason these systems haven't garnered much attention is that they haven't been particularly effective or accurate, as UC Berkeley researchers noted in a 2011 report. Now, a US agency believes it may have found the answer: the Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection system developed by Xerox.

The practice of pricing fuel with a fraction of a penny is thought to have started around the 1930s. While we can't be sure who was the first to price fuel this way, it seems to have become relatively commonplace across the United States all the sudden around the same time. So what happened? In short- taxes and the Great Depression.

The BMW I3 is a lovely hunk of automobile, the kind of vehicle you would save up for years to buy, and then polish with a diaper. Hold on there, sir. Do you really want to drive this masterpiece of engineering with a Samsung Gear S smartwatch?

Pioneer's NEX in-dash systems are some of the most advanced out there, putting interactive multimedia and navigation powers in even the crappiest vehicles. And they're getting even better in 2015 with support for both Android Auto and CarPlay. No matter which side of the smartphone wars you're on, Pioneer has you covered.

With automotive gadgety getting ever more advanced, the humble key fob has been left behind — until now. Because BMW's i8 plug-in-hybrid sports car now comes with touchscreen fob that lets you do far more than just lock and unlock your car.

We all have one of those holiday travel stories. That time you got to the airport and realised you forgot to click the buy button. That time you stepped onto the train platform and the zipper on your suitcase broke sending all of your sweaters onto the tracks. That time you got on a bus and your carsick neighbour barfed on his shoes. Life is just a John Candy movie waiting to happen.

IFTTT is a simple yet powerful way to put your digital stuff to work making your life easier, automatically. Now, thanks to a collaboration with Automatic, drivers of some 2011 or newer Ford vehicles can summon IFTTT with the push of a steering-wheel button.

GM is already taking technology in cars seriously, but it has plans to take it to the next level, and soon. Yesterday, the company announced that in less than two years its cars will communicate with each other — and hopefully even drive themselves.

American car design reached its experimental, optimistic zenith in the post-WWII era. Yet for every car built, hundreds of sketches and concepts were destroyed, the designers who penned them working in corporate anonymity. This new documentary works to bring these ageing designers and their beautiful concept work back into the spotlight.

The auto industry spans across the globe, but America has a particular passion for pistons. Pop Chart Lab's latest print rounds up some of the best, most beautiful, and downright Americanest vehicles ever produced in this great land, from 1895 right up through 2014.

A Silicon Valley startup just revealed the latest piece of electronic future-tech, a 500hp, all-electric supercar that does zero to 100 faster than a Porsche 911. But the most important part of the Renovo Coupe isn't cutting-edge at all: It's that gorgeous body, designed in 1964.

Josephine Daskam Bacon was an author known for her adventure serials that featured female protagonists. But in 1929, she took a break from her regular fiction writing and slipped on her futurist goggles for an article in Century magazine titled "In Nineteen Seventy-Nine".20 Bacon imagined just how much progress women will have made fifty years hence — and whether her granddaughter would be able to "have it all" as some people here in the future might say.